The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

wanted him to leave her alone.
Deborah had started scrubbing people’s floors and ironing for small amounts of money.
She’d try to walk home alone after work, but Galen would usually pick her up along the way
and try to touch her in the car. One day not long after her twelfth birthday, he pulled up beside
Deborah and told her to get in. This time she kept walking.
Galen jammed the car into park and yelled, “You get in this damn car girl!”
Deborah refused. “Why should I get in?” she said. “I ain’t doing nothing wrong, it’s still
daylight and I just walkin down the street.”
“Your father looking for you,” he snapped.
“Let him come get me then! You been doin things to my body you ain’t supposed to do,”
she yelled. “I don’t want to be nowhere with you by myself no more. Lord gave me enough
sense to know that.”
She turned to run but he hit her, grabbed her by the arm, threw her into the car, and kept
right on having his way with her. A few weeks later, as Deborah walked home from work with
a neighborhood boy named Alfred “Cheetah” Carter, Galen pulled up alongside them, yelling
at her to get in the car. When Deborah refused, Galen raced up the street, tires screaming. A
few minutes later he pulled up beside her again, this time with Day in the passenger seat. Ga-
len jumped out of the car, cussing and screaming and telling her she was a whore. He
grabbed Deborah by the arm, threw her in the car, and punched her hard in the face. Her
father didn’t say a word, just stared through the windshield.
Deborah cried the whole way home to Bobbette and Lawrence’s house, blood dripping
from her split eyebrow, then leapt from the car and ran through the house, straight into the
closet where she hid when she was upset. She held the door closed tight. Bobbette saw De-
borah run through the house crying, saw the blood on her face, and chased her to the closet.
With Deborah inside sobbing, Bobbette pounded on the door saying, “Dale, what the hell is
going on?”
Bobbette had been part of the family long enough to know that cousins sometimes had
their way with other cousins. But she didn’t know about Galen hurting Deborah, because De-
borah never told anyone—she was afraid she’d get in trouble.
Bobbette pulled Deborah from the closet, grabbed her shoulders, and said, “Dale, if you
don’t tell me nothing, I won’t know nothing. Now, I know you love Galen like he your father,
but you got to tell me what’s goin on.”
Deborah told Bobbette that Galen had hit her, and that he sometimes talked dirty to her in
the car. She said nothing about Galen touching her, because she was sure Bobbette would
kill him and she worried that with Galen dead and Bobbette in jail for murdering him, she’d
have lost the two people who cared for her most in the world.